April 16, 2015

AMEN TO THIS!

Anyone serious about gay rights is going to recognize our main obstacle: Christians. I walked past a gay-friendly church the other day and they had a placard outside with some biblical quote which seemed to support gays. But they're just doing the same thing that anti-gay fundamentalists do--cherry-picking the BIble for whichever verses suit their cause. The anti-gay legislation in Indiana, Arkansas and Louisiana are all based on religious discrimination. It's time to start discriminating back at the nasty people who use the Bible and their religion as a weapon against gays. Without religion to back them up, they'd just be hateful bigots.

"There's a troubling trend in liberal America: the desire to marginalize right-wing Christians by claiming they don't understand their own religion. While this is true in a number of respects, it doesn't change the fact that they're right about something: Paul condemns queer folks. And there isn't a shred of evidence that Jesus was a fan either, assuming he existed.

I'm all for dismissing opinions that are damaging and harmful. But we can't do so by being openly insincere and insecure in the process. Queer identity, as it's commonly understood (if it even is commonly understood today), wasn't a concept until very recent history. The entire Bible had been finished for over a millennium by the time the word "gay" came to exist.

What the Bible does do is prescribe behavior. Gay sex is not once directly described in a positive manner, and it's explicitly condemned in the Hebrew texts. When Christians tell you that their book calls you an "abomination," they're more right than wrong. Despite how infrequently it occurs, clobber passages are there.

Sure, David and Jonathan seemed to have had a little thing going on up in that field. And it's certainly true that writers of the Bible had varying positions on sexual norms. We can see that from the evolution between the way the earliest texts describe women to the way Jesus describes women.

But there's an incredibly good reason LGBT folks and their allies should agree with anti-gay Christians that the Bible condemns them: if we bother arguing that the Bible supports us, we're conceding its validity as a moral text. And once we free ourselves from its shackles, fundamentalists can just use it to abuse the next minority group unfortunate enough to stumble across their path."